Man City’s second-smallest squad in Europe should come as no surprise if you know Pep Guardiola

Last weekend's chaotic defeat to Tottenham proved something many Manchester City fans had been saying all along, albeit not in the way we'd have liked.

Pep Guardiola's excellent and admittedly expensively assembled squad are not impossible to compete with. They are not irreparably damaging football. It is not the case that there's no hope whatsoever for anyone else.

An interesting misconception within this reductive analysis, ultimately a clumsy attempt to justify giving little to no credit to an obvious demonstration of sporting excellence, is that City have an unfathomably deep squad, with world-class footballers falling out of the cupboards at the CFA.

Therefore, in some quarters of the fanbase, the CIES Football Observatory's latest weekly investigation was greeted gleefully.

It showed that of all clubs in Europe’s big five leagues - England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France - only West Ham (27) have used fewer than City’s 28 players in domestic top-flight matches over the past 365 days.

This does not mean City’s squad is not wonderfully well-equipped and built precisely to their coach’s specification. On the contrary, it is lean and mean side by Guardiola’s design.

“One of the common misconceptions about Pep’s time as Barca coach was that he planned to duplicate every position in his team, giving him two right-backs, two left-backs, two centre-forwards and so on, “ wrote Guardiola’s biographer Marti Perarnau in his book Pep Confidential .

“In fact, he wants footballers who can play in at least two, if not three positions. He is looking for men with the talent and flexibility to play as central defenders, defensive midfielders or central midfielders.”

Look across City’s squad today, and there are numerous